LONDON: The world’s first subway system marked its 150th anniversary yesterday, with reports showing conditions way back when were much as they are today: Busy, congested and stressful for passengers.
“The constant cry, as the trains arrived, of ‘no room,’ appeared to have a very depressing effect upon those assembled,” The Guardian newspaper reported on the public opening of London’s Metropolitan Line on Jan. 10, 1863. The first stretch of rail had opened the day before, on Jan. 9.
The line — the first part of what is now an extensive London transport network that has shaped the British capital and its suburbs — ran 120 trains each way during the day, carrying up to 40,000 excited passengers. Extra steam locomotives and cars were called in to handle the crowds.
Architectural historian David Lawrence said the rapid expansion of the subway network — better known in London as the Tube — had a major impact on the city’s design. The Tube helped lure people away from the inner city into new areas where new housing was being built near the stations.
The houses were built in a village style mocked by some historians as already dated.
“They were selling an England which had already passed by that time,” said Lawrence, a principal lecturer at Kingston University.
In 1919, the Metropolitan company became directly involved in developing what came to be called “Metro-land” on surplus land. One of the company’s promotional posters displayed drab rows of inner city terrace houses and urged people to, “Leave this and move to Edgware.”
However, they were also selling the dual benefit of a quiet, unpolluted suburban life paired with rapid access to the cultural and economic benefits of the metropolis, Lawrence said.
The pioneering Metropolitan Line sparked a new wave of underground development which today has grown into a 249-mile (402-kilometer) system carrying 1.2 billion passenger journeys each year.
Although Londoners love to complain about its sometimes sketchy performance, the Tube and its related rail lines can be a remarkable efficient way to move vast numbers of people in and out of the city, with roughly 3.5 million journeys completed each day. It provided nearly flawless transport during the recent London Olympics despite fears that it would buckle under the extra strain.
Charles Pearson, a lawyer who saw the line as a tool of social reform that would enable the poor to live in healthier surroundings on the perimeter of the city, began promoting the line in the 1850s.
Pearson made a crucial contribution by persuading the Corporation of the City of London — the governing body of the financial district — to invest in the line.
Like many an innovation, the proposal to build a three-mile (4.8 kilometer) underground rail line from Paddington Station in central London to Farringdon on the edge of the financial district in the east aroused great skepticism and criticism when it was first proposed.
An editorial in The Times of London at the time found the concept repulsive: “A subterranean railway under London was awfully suggestive of dank, noisome tunnels buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life; passages inhabited by rats, soaked with sewer drippings, and poisoned by the escape of gas mains,” the newspaper declared.
“It seemed an insult to common sense to suppose that people who could travel as cheaply on the outside of a Paddington bus would prefer, as a merely quicker medium, to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London.”
London’s Daily News took a more macabre view: “For the first time in the history of the world men can ride in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes,” the newspaper said, adding, “lower down than graveyards.”
For the anniversary celebrations, Transport for London will run old-style steam powered trains underground — but only on Sunday, so as not to disrupt its crucial people-moving function during the working week.
World’s first subway marks 150 years in operation
World’s first subway marks 150 years in operation
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
